An age-old motif courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
